Or maybe they actually sell things that are useful to companies that allows them to invest in making the public website more valuable? But because they always put the community first, they have until this recent change been hesitant to even mention anything that they sell for fear that users would revolt. Of all the services I have used, SO has been consistently the best at being user and community centric. Without SO, I am pretty sure I would spend 5x longer to get any useful coding done, that is how much value SO has given me and I suspect the same is true for millions of other developers.

By the way, Quora and Genius are both super useful. I really do not understand what you mean by "lost the battle".